How to delete all pending comments in WordPress

Do you have a lot of comments pending in your WordPress website and want to remove them?

This often happens especially if you get a lot of spam in your comments.

Normally, deleting comments in WordPress is easy, but it becomes more difficult when there is a large number of comments pending. You may even run into weird errors while deleting comments in bulk.

In this article, we are going to show you step by step how to easily mass delete all pending comments in WordPress.

But before you start, take the time to take a look at How to install a WordPress theme, How many plugins to install on WordPress.

Then find out together our list.

What are the pending comments in WordPress?

Pending comments in WordPress are comments that are pending moderation.

You will find them in the menu Comments from your WordPress dashboard.

We recommend users to enable moderation of comments on all of their websites to fight spam in Comments. This means that all comments on your website will go into the queue before they are approved.

Why would anyone want to delete pending comments?

There are many scenarios where you may need to do this. For example :

• The Akismet WordPress anti-spam plugin has been disabled on your website and suddenly all the pending comment spam appears.
• You just forgot a website, and it has collected hundreds of comments that are no longer relevant.
• Articles on your website generate a lot of unwanted comments
• Forgot to turn off comments on older posts

It is very difficult to moderate each comment individually. If you are satisfied that there are no comments marked " Pending You want to keep, then you can simply delete them en masse.

1. Manually delete all pending comments in WordPress

If you only have a few hundred comments pending, it's pretty quick to delete them manually.

Just go to the " Comments "In the WordPress admin area, then click on the" Pending To see a list of all pending comments.

By default, this list will show 20 pending comments. To change this, click on the " Screen options In the upper right corner of the page.

Then type '100' in the 'Number of items per page'and click on the button Apply :

Now that you have 100 comments displayed, just check the box to the left of " Author At the top of the comments list. This selects all comments on the page:

Then click on the drop-down list " bulk actions "And select the" To trash ". Go and click the button Apply to move all comments to the trash:

WordPress will automatically display the next 100 comments on the page. Just repeat the process to remove them.

When you delete all comments on WordPress, they are not deleted right away. Instead, they are sent to the "Basket" and will stay there for 30 days. After that, they will be automatically deleted permanently.

If you prefer to delete them permanently right away, then you must switch to the 'Put in the trash' on the page 'Comments', then click on Empty the trash.

You will then see a message confirming that these comments have been deleted:

Please note: You can use the screen options to view up to 999 comments per page. However, this will increase the load on your servers. web hosting and slow down your website.

If you have a few hundred comments pending, then we recommend that you use a plugin method to remove them.

2. Deletion of a large number of pending comments using a plugin WordPress

The fastest way to remove a very large number of pending comments is to use a plugin.

This will delete your pending comments (and spam) permanently. We recommend you to make a backup of your WordPress website before proceeding, just in case you change your mind later.

First of all, you need to install and activate the plugin Delete Pending Comments. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

After activation, go to the page Comments »Delete pending comments in your WordPress administrator. You will see a message telling you how many comments are pending.

Please note: This figure includes spam comments, which are deleted along with pending comments.

To remove all pending comments, you must type the required line of text in the box. You can copy and paste this text if you prefer.

After that go ahead and click on the 'Delete Pending Comments'.

You will then see a message confirming that all pending comments and spam have been deleted.

Remove only comment spam in WordPress

What if you don't want to delete the pending comments, but just want to delete the ones that are marked as spam? It's very easy to do in WordPress.

First, go to the page Comments in your WordPress dashboard and click on the tab spam :

Then click on the button Delete all junk". This will permanently delete all comment spam, not just the current page:

2. WooCommerce Autoresponder

WooCommerce Autoresponder is a WordPress Plugin which allows you to subscribe your customers to your autoresponder. This WordPress Plugin also displays a newsletter subscription box to easily integrate WooCommerce to the auto-responder.

As functionalities you will find among others: a complete integration with WooCommerce, 9 auto-responder support, no coding knowledge required, easy to set up, and much more.

Read also: MailChimp tutorial in English: the complete guide to creating a newsletter

Download | Demo | Web hosting

3. Live Search and Smart AutoComplete

Live Search and Smart AutoComplete is a WordPress Plugin premium that will enrich the search bar of your website. This plugin does not need any coding or inserting shortcode. It works right after you activate and click on the first initialize button.

It also has few parameters if you want to change the type of indexed publication, taxonomies, etc.

Do not hesitate to read also 10 WordPress plugins to optimize the search function

It works perfectly with WooCommerce and all popular WordPress themes and recent.

Download | Demo | Web hosting

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Conclusion